SIO urges T-Hub to cancel Nov 16 event with Israeli firms

Hyderabad: The Students Islamic Organisation (SIO) has condemned startup incubator T-Hub’s engagement with Israeli defence-linked firms that are “complicit in war crimes” and has urged the government to cancel the event.

T-Hub plans to host 20 Israeli companies on November 16, across defence technology, robotics, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence (AI).

Siasat.com had earlier reported that at least 11 of the participants have ties to the Israeli military, effectively playing a role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Five of them supply hardware, software, or services that Israel’s armed forces have used in the war on Gaza or in the occupation of Palestinian land.

One makes attack drones. One descends from the company that built surveillance systems for the West Bank separation barrier and the Gaza perimeter. One makes sensors for Israel’s Merkava tank, while another builds the robots that maintain those tanks. The fifth is an AI firm that works for Israel’s defence and intelligence agencies.

“Telangana’s engagement with the Israeli defence industry not only goes against the long-standing principled anti-colonial stance of the Indian state but also exposes the duality in Congress’s stance on Palestinian statehood and its collaborations with the settler-colonial state,” SIO stated in the release.

“We have seen reports of Indian-manufactured bombs dropped on civilian populations in Gaza, and the continuation of these collaborations with Israeli defence companies is nothing short of a sign of moral corruption; they come at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian lives at the hands of the very state,” it added.

SIO Telangana State President Mohd Faraz Ahmed said, “Economic and technological interests can never come before human lives. At a time when the Palestinian people continue to suffer immense loss and destruction, welcoming companies linked to the Israeli military sends a deeply troubling message and stands in contradiction to our moral and historic responsibility towards justice.”

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